“Blue Blankets” Published in Peregrine

Honoured to have my short creative nonfiction piece, Blue Blankets, selected for the annually produced Peregrine literary journal from Amherst Writers & Artists.

First published in “Peregrine: The Caregiving Issue” by Amherst Writers & Artists Press, Nov 19, 2024.

Blue Blankets

Yellow towels start the day, blue blankets end it. White sheets are all through it, and you hope no red buttons get pushed today. At first, in the maternity ward, the heavy knit blue blankets are a comfort easing you into your new life. By the time you’ve slept in the NICU a hundred days or more, the cold recycled air goes right through the weaves.

You get to know the code. Blue bird stickers on your door mean you’re going home soon, red birds mean you’re not.

To prepare, you buy anything colorful. Patterned swaddle blankets, cartoon animal print pyjamas, sheets with bold alphabet letters that probably look like frightening, hazy sea monsters to your baby’s new and underdeveloped eyes. The light up rattle, the loud music toy, the bright red truck. You buy it all.

You finally drive home together under red and golden leaves but you’re back again by the end of the year, surrounded by white roads and grey skies.

Back to the glass-lined hallways that shouldn’t feel like home and the familiar tight, kind smiles from nurses you don’t know. They bring you blue blankets in the OR waiting room, all but deserted at 2am. For once, you wish to hear a shrill symphony of beeping machines around you instead, which has become more comforting than silence.

It went well. As well as any emergency pediatric neurosurgery can go, anyway. It’s routine for you by now. The only haircuts your child has had have been by a neurosurgeon. (“More expensive than a presidential haircut!” you joke to friends while they stare back at you, appalled.)

You see him then, still falsely asleep, freshly shaved scalp stained bright pink. The yellow towel covering the pillow to catch the much darker blood. Your eyes follow the cheery pink antiseptic solution instead as it flows down his neck, ending in bright splotches and splashes across his belly. You imagine a precocious toddler getting into your watercolor paints, brushing pinks and reds through his full head of hair. You feel a stab then; will he be able to cause such mischief one day?

Your practicality takes over. You plan medication schedules and wound care for at home. You remember to drink some water. You set aside a yellow towel for yourself for the morning, next to your always-packed travel toiletries bag.

Lying down on the futon beside his bed, you pull the blue blanket up to your chin and roll your eyes as the cool recycled air hits your suddenly exposed ankles.

Still, it’s a kind of comfort.

Copyright Michelle Martin.